Narrative Of Life: Frederick Douglas's Message To Women

Douglass’s Message to Women Frederick Douglass gives many examples of the treatment of women like the following passage: “this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and made a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.” (Douglass 1183) Through this passage, Douglass brings to light that enslaved women are raped by their masters because of the master’s lust and the master’s desire to produce more slaves. By looking at the passage in the context of the rest of Narrative of Life, Douglass makes it clear that women who are raped by their masters and birth a child from the rape have it worse than others because of the excess brutality they receive from the master’s wife. Douglass’s word choices like “lust” and “wicked” shows that Douglass finds the practice of raping slaves for lust and reproduction to be very displeasing because both of those words are

Looking at this passage in the context of the rest of Narrative of Life, the woman being beaten is not only innocent and undeserving of the whipping but she is also whipped to the extent of blood pouring from her wounds. Douglass’s specific phrasing, “(amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him)”, is a clear example of who the victim is and the mentality of the perpetrator. By going into such graphic detail of the beating of the enslaved woman, Douglass evokes more pathos and empathy from the female